


The Three Spectres

by BisexualRoger (HyperPluviophile)



Category: Queen (Band)
Genre: Angst, Character Study, Hurt No Comfort, Implied/Referenced Drug Use, Inspired by A Christmas Carol, Self-Hatred, Unhappy Ending
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-24
Updated: 2020-12-24
Packaged: 2021-03-10 18:12:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 726
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28291434
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HyperPluviophile/pseuds/BisexualRoger
Summary: They’re always with him now. This trio of ghosts. How long they’ve haunted his steps he cannot say for sure, but they echo in his every move. Leering over his shoulder. Overshadowing every decision, every breath, even as he tries to lose himself in the delights of Munich.
Comments: 9
Kudos: 11





	The Three Spectres

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Aboutnothingness (Thesherlockholmes)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Thesherlockholmes/gifts).



> The first of my Christmas gift fics! I was going to wait and publish them all at once, but I'm ridiculously impatient so I'm posting the first wave now. Keep an eye out for the rest x 
> 
> To Myfairykingmercury- Where do I even begin? You're a darling and a treasure, and it has been a delight getting to know you over the last year. I really hope I did your beautiful writing style justice <3 xx 
> 
> Oh, and thank you ever so much nastally for continuing to be the world's best beta xxx (Rest assured I haven't forgotten you! Your gift is just taking me a little while longer...)

They’re always with him now. This trio of ghosts. How long they’ve haunted his steps he cannot say for sure, but they echo in his every move. Leering over his shoulder. Overshadowing every decision, every breath, even as he tries to lose himself in the delights of Munich. 

The first is most apparent. Frozen perfectly in posters. Captured on album covers. A physical spectre. Brought out by interviewers for a shallow question, or a laugh depending on how cheap the paper. 

The sparkling figure of a younger man. Long haired, slender, beautiful. Projecting the image of the ethereal Adonis with all the pomp he can muster. 

“What on earth was all that? I’ve absolutely no idea!”

In the few sober hours he has, he finds it sickening how easily the betrayal comes. How flippantly he can ridicule the figure. Laugh away the man he used to be. 

The man who had paraded and preened like a peacock. Slathered the face he could barely stand to see in the mirror with makeup, until he too could just about believe that he was not merely a scrawny boy with ambitions far beyond his ability, but truly a God worthy of the name Mercury. The man who had strutted about in clothes so form fitting he’d had near whiplash from how readily he could both love and despise them. The man desperately building the myth of Mercury, hoping beyond hope that with enough glitter and pomp thrown at it he could truly do it. Outgrow the husk of flesh he called home and finally be a person worthy of the space he occupied. 

That was all he’d been doing back then. Filling space. Flooding every inch of stage with his larger than life presence. So painfully aware that while everything he’d ever wanted was right within his grasp, it could all fall to pieces just as quickly as it had come together. 

Nowadays he doesn’t need to be afraid of taking up space. Far from it, he practically pays to do it. Champagne, private planes…He has an entourage for goodness sake. 

But it’s here where the spectre of the present lies. In the fleeting in-betweens, the hours just after lows and right before new highs. In airport bars and early studio mornings. In the way Roger hesitantly asks him if he’s going to be alright this Christmas. If he’d like to come to dinner. 

This ghost doesn’t howl in pain like the echoes of his younger self. It merely whimpers. Quietly suffering in the way he sometimes wakes alone, sheets bloodied and pillows damp with the remnants of a night that he doesn’t quite remember. It is the ghost of the lonely man. The man who has everything, and yet, when the curtain falls, aches from the absence of what he is still missing. 

And then there’s the last. The most terrifying ghost of all.

The past and the present he can live with. Drugs and sex and alcohol make them bearable, if only for hours at a time. But there’s little to be done for this haunting figure of absence. 

After all, what future can there be for a man like him? 

Monroe, Plath, Van Gogh… 

No great artist was ever truly happy. Nor did they endure long. That’s just the reality of it. But even so… Perhaps it’s penance. The price he has to pay, in exchange for all he’s achieved. A life of such decadence surely cannot go unpunished. He has everything he could possibly want, and in return all sense of a tangible future has slipped away. As he downs another beer, brings home another stranger, there’s a sense of the grains in an hourglass slipping through his fingers. While Roger and Brian and John are anchored down by family, by marriage, he remains adrift.. 

Especially now. 

Now that there’s nothing but him and the streets of Munich. So full of life and light and excitement, and at the same time so hollow. So cold. Anything that could possibly lie beyond these streets is incomprehensible, which has him inclined to believe that there is nothing at all. 

So he floats. From club to hotel to club. Ever followed by the shadows of who he once was, who he desperately tries to pretend he isn’t, and the looming spectre of where, _when _, it will end.__

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you very much for reading, and have a wonderful Christmas, holiday, or just a fantastic December xxx


End file.
